Introduction
This book is about the world the Arabs encountered when they conquered the Middle East in the mid-seventh century and the world those conquests created. The importance of the Arab conquests for the history of the Middle East and, indeed, for the history of the subsequent fourteen hundred years, needs no emphasis. Apart from the rise and triumph of Christianity, no other event in the first millennium rivals them in significance. A majority of the population of the world today is affected in profound ways, daily, by these two events.
For all its importance, however, this period has been remarkably resistant to the writing of a compelling and persuasive unified account that does equal justice to the religious landscape of the region and to its changes under both Roman and Arab rule. On the Roman side, one easily gets lost in a thicket of ecclesiastical labels and rarefied Greek theological terms. The fact that these terms, when rendered into Syriac—a dialect of Aramaic that served as the literary language for much of the Middle East’s Christian population at this time—might mean different things to different Christian confessions does not help matters, nor does the fact that many of the labels used to refer to various groups can be regarded as offensive. It is a period rich in historical importance but also abounding in opportunities for perplexity.
The appearance of Muslims on the scene adds another layer of potential confusion. The emergence of Islam along with its controversies and civil wars brings with it befuddling Arabic names, competing precedence claims, and tribal genealogical assertions and relations that seem, to the uninitiated, as arcane as they are apparently consequential. The Islamic tradition has left us
remarkably detailed—even at times awkwardly intimate—information about the Prophet Muḥammad, and yet accounts of early Islamic history have frequently been mired in interminable and intractable debates about how much, if anything, we can believe of the traditional Muslim account of Islamic origins. More significant than this or that report about the Prophet’s behavior or activities are the bigger questions that haunt the field: Did the Qur’ān actually originate in Muḥammad’s lifetime, in Western Arabia? Can we even speak of ‘Islam’ as a phenomenon before the late seventh century?
In the last several decades, it has become increasingly common for scholars to attempt to bring together the late antique and early Islamic worlds.1 In this book, I will try to do this as well, but I hope to offer a slightly different approach from a number of previous attempts. I will proceed from a basic assumption that if we want to understand how Arab conquerors related to the traditions of the populations they conquered and, more specifically, how Christians and Muslims interacted with one another, we must first understand Christian-Christian interactions, for the Middle East, in the several centuries before the birth of the Prophet, witnessed the irreparable fracturing of its Christian community and the development of rival and competing churches.
Looking at intra-Christian relations in the late Roman period will take us to a still more antecedent question: What did most of the population of the Middle East actually make of the disputes that had so divided the Christian communities of the region and which fill the pages of manuals of church history? What did it mean to be a Christian for most people, and what importance was accorded to intra-Christian religious differences? These questions will lead us to a whole host of further questions. Was there a layering of knowledge that could be found in the Christian community—that is, did some members know more than others? The answer to this last question is obvious, but it leads to a further question whose answer is not so immediately clear: What were the consequences of such a layering? In order to understand the world that the Arab conquests created, I want to suggest, we need to first understand the world they found.
And to understand that world, we need to attempt to understand the religious attitudes and behaviors of most of its inhabitants and how those attitudes and behaviors affected the leaders of the Christian churches. It is these leaders who have left us the texts we study in order to try to understand this world.
A great deal of this book will be an effort to put flesh on the unseen contexts that swirl around such texts. These contexts were there when the texts were written, but they escape our notice easily; once supplied, however, they cast many things into new light. The great majority of Christians in the Middle East, I will suggest in Part I of this book, belonged to what church leaders referred to as ‘the simple.’ They were overwhelmingly agrarian, mostly illiterate, and likely had little understanding of the theological complexities that split apart the Christian community in the region. ‘Simple’ here does not connote ‘simple-minded,’ as it might in some varieties of English, nor should it be understood as a category restricted to the laity: there were monks, priests, and even bishops who were simple believers. The men who wrote the texts we study lived their lives among these simple believers: they fed them and ate with them, they prayed with them and for them, they taught and healed them, and they had the responsibility of pastoral care for them. A key to understanding the world that the Arabs found is the recognition that it was overwhelmingly one of simple, ordinary Christians; and that it was a world fracturing into rival groups on the basis of disagreements that most of those Christians could not fully understand.
I will attempt to show how this paradox can help explain the shape that Middle Eastern Christianity had in the centuries after the Council of Chalcedon took place in AD 451 and before the Arab conquests covered in Part II of this book. There was, during this period, fierce competition for the loyalties of simple, everyday Christians among leaders of the various Christian movements in the Middle East. This competition helped fuel debates, the composition of polemics, the translation of texts, the creation of educational institutions, and the development of a Syriac-language syllabus of
study (among Miaphysites) in the seventh century. In this regard, it might be helpful to recall the competition between Catholic and Protestant missionaries in the nineteenth-century Middle East and the educational consequences it had for the region, especially Lebanon.2
Because the question of continuity/discontinuity between the periods of Roman and Arab rule in the Middle East has been a topic of such great interest to so many, I will pause for a brief “Interlude” between Parts II and III to look at it more closely, focusing especially on the question of continuity when seen through the prism of Syriac sources and the unique non-imperial, non-state-centered perspective that they offer.3 The intense competition among religious elites for the allegiances of simple Christians led to a series of remarkable intellectual continuities in the Syriac-speaking world across the sixth to ninth centuries, a time that has traditionally been seen as one of great cultural rupture.
In Part III, I will arrive at the question of how Arab conquerors and settlers fit into the landscape sketched out in the first two sections of the book. Here, I will emphasize that when thinking about the history of the Middle East in the early period of Muslim rule, one needs to constantly supply another context often invisible in the Arabic texts we read about the period: that of the nonMuslims who formed the overwhelming demographic majority of the region for centuries after the Arab conquests. The Christian communities of the Middle East are the ones with which I am most familiar, and it is for this reason (as well as for reasons of space) that I have focused primarily on them rather than on Jews, Zoroastrians, or others; the story of how Muslims related to these other non-Muslim groups is an important one that I will leave to scholars more learned than I. Discussions of Christian-Muslim interaction have customarily focused on actual interactions—there is a rich body of scholarship that has located, classified, and analyzed instances of Christian-Muslim encounter 4—but in Part III, I will attempt to look first at what ‘Christian’ and ‘Muslim’ meant in the seventh and eighth centuries before asking questions about how
Christians and Muslims related to one another. As in Parts I and II, my focus will be on the level of the ordinary, simple believers who were the great mass of both Christians and Muslims living in the Middle East in the early medieval period.
Crucially, in this early period of Muslim rule, we also need to recognize that most of the Prophet’s notional followers, including many of the leaders of the early Muslim state, were people who had converted late in his life for apparently this-worldly reasons, often en masse. These late converts, many of whom rebelled against the leadership of the Prophet’s community after his death and had to be forced back into the fold by means of military violence, likely had little deep understanding of Muḥammad’s message or the full implications of what it meant to belong to the religious community he founded. Indeed, those implications and Islam itself were still being worked out in this period. One of the keys to thinking about the earliest Christian-Muslim interactions, I will therefore suggest, is to keep in mind that we are dealing with a setting in which simple Christians were meeting late mass converts and their descendants, even as Islam itself was being elaborated as a full-fledged way of living in the world.
Keeping our focus on simple believers, Christian and Muslim, will also give us what I hope is a different perspective on the question of the gradual conversion from Christianity to Islam of much of the Middle East’s population over the course of the Middle Ages. Whatever the social and economic benefits and consequences—and these often will have been significant—when viewed from the standpoint of ordinary religious believers, a conversion from Christianity to Islam may not have been as momentous, in religious terms, as one might expect. We are dealing with a world, I will suggest, in which one could become a Muslim and still hold on to many Christian practices and even beliefs.
Here an obvious but basic point should be emphasized. We should resist the easy assumption that the beliefs and practices of the contemporary Muslim (or Christian) population of the Middle East in an era of printing, satellite television, the Internet, and attempted
universal public education will have been substantially similar to those of most of the medieval Muslim (or Christian) population of the region. We need to think away the ability of the state and religious institutions to use modern mass communication and education to create a uniformity of religious belief and understanding. As a useful analogy, it might be helpful to recall that ‘[e]ven in a country such as France, which had centuries-long traditions of political frontiers and where norms of proper usage had been developing for centuries, probably not much more than 50 percent of French men and women spoke French as their native language in 1900.’5 The understanding and practice of Islam by most medieval Middle Eastern Muslims will have been quite different from that of the literate, television-watching, Internet and social-media using Muslim population in the cities of the Middle East today.6 It will also have been different from the beliefs found expressed in the medieval texts we study. As is the case also with Christian writings of the late antique and early medieval periods, when it comes to Islamic religious documents, we need to learn to see the invisible context of simple, ordinary adherents swirling around the things we read.
The question of the motivations, meaning, and consequences of conversion will be a major focus of Part III of this book. At the end of Part III, I will take up the question of how Muslims related to the religious traditions of the people they now ruled. This was a world where, very literally, the mosque was in the shadow of the church. Following Albrecht Noth, I will suggest that the precarious demographic and cultural situation that conquering Muslims found themselves in led to attempts, reflected in a variety of ḥadīth, to limit contact with Christians and Jews and discourage imitation of their behavior and religious practices. Alongside such attempts at proscription, however, can be set other putatively Prophetic utterances, which seemed to grant approval to seeking information from Christians and Jews. What is more, it is possible to identify various figures who did just this. Furthermore, scholars have long
noted a variety of wide-ranging continuities between late antique Christian practices and later Muslim practices and beliefs.
Part IV takes up the question of the process by which this great host of late antique ideas, habits, and at times even texts, entered into what Patricia Crone termed ‘the bloodstream of Islam.’ The field of medieval Middle Eastern history is commonly understood to be Islamic history, an unspoken and sectarian conflation that relegates the non-Muslim population to what is usually, at best, the shadows of whatever image of the period we are given. Social history provides a key approach for recovering the role that non-Muslims played in making the world that scholars of the region in this period study. Moreover, the question of how Muslims related to the traditions of the religious communities they now found themselves ruling provides a vehicle for making the story of the Middle East under Muslim rule less overtly elitist and confessional—that is, one that focuses on more than just its hegemonic Muslim minority and concerns itself with all of the region’s inhabitants.
In attempting to tell this story, I have made use of a large number of sources, in various languages, and belonging to a variety of genres. In order to keep the book from becoming any longer than it already is, I have tried to keep issues of Quellenkritik to a minimum and have instead chosen to offer some reflections on my approach to the sources in Appendix I.
Much of what follows will be an attempt to tell the religious history of the late antique and medieval Middle East from perspectives that are typically not privileged or which are often traditionally ignored or relegated to some sort of inferior status. Chronologically, my main focus will be roughly the years 500–1000, that is, from the era of Anastasius and Justinian in the post-Chalcedonian Roman Empire up to the pre-Crusader Abbasid period, but I will use evidence from other periods as well; geographically, I will concentrate on the Fertile Crescent—Syria, Palestine, and Iraq—but other regions, most
notably Egypt, will also appear. Before the Arab conquests, my main emphasis will be on the simple, uneducated Christian and how he or she related to the theological debates that occupied the leaders of their church. I will focus on the Aramaic-speaking Christian population of the Middle East, not just those authors who wrote in Greek. In the period of Muslim rule, I will be particularly interested in the Christian population of the Middle East, the population which must have been a large majority in much of the region but whose existence and importance often silently vanishes after the conquests. The result of pushing these perspectives from the margins toward the center will be, I hope, a narrative that subverts deeply ingrained tendencies in the historiography of this period. This book has two fundamental goals: first, to argue against adopting a heavily theological understanding of the Christian communities in the postChalcedonian Middle East as well as against a strongly doctrinally focused understanding of Christian-Muslim interactions. And second, to de-center Islam within medieval Middle Eastern history and desectarianize the subject by undermining the common understanding that the history of the medieval Middle East is synonymous with the problems and questions of Islamic history. If modern European historians now commonly speak of ‘transnational histories,’ historians of the medieval Middle East should strive for ‘transconfessional histories’ that explicitly reject the unstated millet system which has traditionally governed how the field has operated, a system that gives Islam, a minority religion, pride of place in the region’s medieval history and dissertations focused on Islamic topics distinct preference in hiring decisions for academic positions. Apart from distorting contemporary under-standings—both in the Middle East and in the West—of the role and importance of non-Muslims in the history of the medieval Middle East, this historiographic millet system distorts how we view medieval Islam itself. For properly understanding the Middle East’s politically dominant medieval Muslim population requires understanding that it is precisely that: a hegemonic minority whose members were descended from nonMuslim converts, one which elaborated and articulated its positions
on a host of issues in conversation and competition with the nonMuslims whom they ruled over, lived alongside of, were frequently related to, and often explicitly defined themselves against ideologically. Another challenge should be kept in mind as well: the East Roman Empire, an overt and thoroughgoing Christian state, represented the chief ideological, political, and military rival of the state governed by Muḥammad’s successors in the centuries after his death. Both internally and externally, non-Muslims were competitors, and they were seen as such.
This book ultimately represents an attempt at writing a nonelitist, desectarianized religious history of the late Roman and early medieval Middle East, one that takes seriously the existence of a layering or continuum of knowledge and engagement in religious communities and which is concerned with the lived religious experience of all the region’s inhabitants, not just that of select members of politically hegemonic groups. Scholars have written many erudite books and articles about learned Christians, Jews, and Muslims in this period. But these were figures who would have constituted a fraction of their respective communities. What happens if we ask about everyone else?
1 The literature is increasingly vast and rich. See, e.g., A. al-Azmeh, The Emergence of Islam in Late Antiquity: Allāh and His People (New York, 2014) and R. G. Hoyland, ed., The Late Antique World of Early Islam: Muslims among Christians and Jews in the East Mediterranean (Princeton, 2015), the latter one volume of more than two dozen that have been published in the landmark series, edited by Lawrence Conrad and Jens Scheiner, Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam. G. Fowden, Before and after Muḥammad: The First Millennium (Princeton, 2014), represented an ambitious attempt at reperiodization. H. Kennedy, ‘Islam,’ in G. W. Bowersock, P. Brown, and O. Grabar, Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World (Cambridge, Mass./London, 1999), pp. 219–37, is a classic statement of the continuities and discontinuities between the late antique and Islamic periods. Av. Cameron, ‘Patristic Studies and the Emergence of Islam,’ in B. Bitton-Ashkelony, T. de Bruyn, and C. Harrison, eds., Patristic Studies in the Twenty-First Century (Turnhout, 2015), pp. 249–78, provided an overview of attempts at viewing Islam within late antiquity and advocated greater integration of patristic and early Islamic studies. A. Borrut and F. M. Donner, eds., Christians and Others in the Umayyad State (Chicago, 2016), can be taken as representative of an increasingly prominent tendency among scholars to focus on non-Muslims in
medieval Muslim empires. Decades before this trend picked up steam, of course, Peter Brown’s World of Late Antiquity (London, 1971) had already set the rise of Islam firmly in the context of the later Roman world. The tendency to set the origins of Islam in the late antique period has been especially notable in Qur’ānic studies. Among an abundance of publications, see, e.g., A. Neuwirth’s, Der Koran als Text der Spätantike: ein europäischer Zugang (Berlin, 2010); Neuwirth, ‘Locating the Qur’an’ and Early Islam in the “Epistemic Space” of Late Antiquity,’ in C. Bakhos and M. Cook, eds., Islam and Its Past: Jahiliyya, Late Antiquity, and the Qur’an (Oxford, 2017), pp. 165–85; G. S. Reynolds, ed., The Qur’ān in Its Historical Context (London/New York, 2008); Reynolds, ed., New Perspectives on the Qur’ān: The Qur’ān in Its Historical Context 2; and N. Schmidt, N. K. Schmidt, and A. Neuwirth, eds., Denkraum Spätantike: Reflexionen von Antiken im Umfeld des Koran (Wiesbaden, 2016).
2 On Catholic-Protestant competition in the Middle East, see, e.g., the brief overview in A. de Dreuzy, The Holy See and the Emergence of the Modern Middle East: Benedict XV’s Diplomacy in Greater Syria (1914–1922) (Washington, D.C., 2016), pp. 218–21.
3 Cf. the remarks in M. Debié and D.G.K. Taylor, ‘Syriac and Syro-Arabic Historical Writing, c. 500–c. 1400,’ in S. Foot and C. F. Robinson, eds., The Oxford History of Historical Writing, vol. 2: 400–1400 (Ox-ford, 2012), p. 156: ‘Syriac historiography is a rare example of non-étatist, non-imperial, history writing.’
4 Most notable perhaps are R. G. Hoyland, Seeing Islam as Others Saw It: A Survey and Evaluation of Christian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian Writings on Early Islam (Princeton, 1997) and the monumental series edited by David Thomas and others, Christian-Muslim Relations: A Bibliographic History, vols. 1–11 (Leiden/Boston, 2009–) (hereafter CMR).
5 P. J. Geary, The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton, 2002), p. 31.
6 J. Grehan, Twilight of the Saints: Everyday Religion in Ottoman Syria and Palestine (New York, 2014) is a very suggestive study. Though based in the late Ottoman period, Grehan’s arguments about the nature of religious understanding and practice for most inhabitants of the Middle East could be applied to earlier periods as well.
Theological Speculation and Theological Literacy
However, it was inevitable that in the great number of people overcome by the Word [sc. by Christianity], because there are many more vulgar and illiterate people than those who have been trained in rational thinking, the former class should far outnumber the more intelligent.
—Origen1
[Celsus] says that ‘some do not even want to give or to receive a reason for what they believe and use such expressions as ‘Do not ask questions; just believe’; and ‘Thy faith will save thee’. And he affirms that they say: ‘The wisdom in the world is an evil, and foolishness a good thing.’ My answer to this is that if every man could abandon the business of life and devote his time to philosophy, no other course ought to be followed but this alone.… However, if this is impossible, since, partly owing to the necessities of life and partly owing to human weakness, very few people are enthusiastic about rational thought, what better way of helping the multitude could be found other than that given to the nations by Jesus?
—Origen2
In the period beginning with the controversy between Cyril and Nestorius in 428 and ending with the Third Council of Constantinople in 680–681, the Christian community of the Middle East splintered into separate and competing churches as a result of disagreements over theological speculation. There was chronic and irresolvable
controversy as to how many natures, persons, energies, and wills there were in the Incarnate Christ.
The failure to reach consensus on these issues was not for a lack of trying. Ecumenical councils were called on at least five occasions —in 431, 449, 451, 553, and 680–681—with vast distances traveled and large sums of money expended in attempts to broker a resolution of sharp theological conflicts. Apart from such spectacular efforts, for centuries Roman emperors attempted in a variety of ways —always ultimately unsuccessful—to get churchmen to come to agreement about the mechanics of how the human and the divine fit together in the person of Christ. Even Sasanian rulers3 and, later, Muslim Caliphs and authorities,4 at times could be drawn into Christian doctrinal wrangling. Churches were seized and plundered. Proponents of this view or that were exiled, mutilated, and even killed. The Roman army might be deployed to attempt to enforce doctrinal consent and unity,5 and on at least one occasion an Umayyad Caliph sent an army to try to do the same.6 The various distinct churches that emerged in the Middle East as a result of the theological controversies that took place in the period bookended by the Councils of Ephesus (431) and Constantinople III (680–681) identified themselves and their rivals on the basis of their Christological stances. Neither violence nor persuasion proved capable of bringing about resolution and reconciliation. Stubbornly, the issues resisted concord.
In this region, more so than any other, a variety of distinct and competing churches eventually developed: there were Chalcedonians, who accepted the Definition of the Council of Chalcedon (AD 451) and held that Christ was incarnate in two natures. There were Miaphysites, who rejected Chalcedon (but accepted the Second Council of Ephesus [AD 449], which would be rejected by supporters of Chalcedon) and held that he was incarnate in one.7 The Church of the East, the largest and most important Christian community in the Sasanian Empire and across the expanse of Asia, also held that Christ was incarnate in two natures but would eventually affirm that he was also incarnate in two hypostases as
opposed to the Chalcedonian view that he was only incarnate in one hypostasis.8 Among Chalcedonians, there would be a split in the seventh century between those who believed that Christ had one will and one energy (Monotheletes) and those who held that he had two wills and two energies (Dyotheletes), with the former developing into the Maronite Church and the latter developing into what are called today the Rūm Orthodox.9
These divisions are only the best known: among Miaphysites, there were as many as twelve different groups, the most prominent being Severan Miaphysites and the Julianist Miaphysites,10 called such by scholars on account of their most important thinkers, Severus of Antioch (d. 536) and Julian of Halicarnassus (d. ca. 527). The Church of the East never experienced a split like that of the Chalcedonians or the Miaphysites, but the Christological (and other) teachings of Henana of Adiabene in the late sixth and early seventh centuries led to fierce disputes within the church and dealt the School of Nisibis, its premier theological training institution, a severe blow from which it never recovered.11
And yet, for all their apparent importance, the intensity of the controversies puzzles modern readers. How could late ancient Christians get so worked up about what seem, to many people today at least, to be rather rarefied metaphysical concepts and concerns? Was believing that Christ had two wills rather than one will worth losing one’s hand and one’s tongue over, as Maximus the Confessor did? Why, in the late 620s, did the Emperor Heraclius reportedly order that the nose and ears be cut off anyone who did not accept the Council of Chalcedon, an ecclesiastical gathering that had been held nearly three centuries earlier?12
The questions become even more pressing if we think about the population of the late antique and early medieval Middle East and eastern Mediterranean. It was overwhelmingly agrarian with higherlevel religious instruction and sophisticated theological literature likely not in great supply (or any supply) in most areas. Though scholars have typically focused on works written by learned churchmen, Christian communities included everything from
Another random document with no related content on Scribd:
The car passed the ornamental ponds, in which the colliers threw their newspapers, and took the private drive to the house. It stood above, aside, a very pleasant stucco building from the middle of the eighteenth century. It had a beautiful alley of yew trees, that had approached an older house, and the hall stood serenely spread out, winking its Georgian panes as if cheerfully. Behind, there were really beautiful gardens.
Connie liked the interior much better than Wragby. It was much lighter, more alive, shapen and elegant. The rooms were panelled with creamy-painted panelling, the ceilings were touched with gilt, and everything was kept in exquisite order, all the appointments were perfect, regardless of expense. Even the corridors managed to be ample and lovely, softly curved and full of life.
But Leslie Winter was alone. He had adored his house. But his park was bordered by three of his own collieries. He had been a generous man in his ideas. He had almost welcomed the colliers in his park. Had the miners not made him rich! So, when he saw the gangs of unshapely men lunging by his ornamental waters—not on the private part of the park, no, he drew the line there—he would say: "the miners are perhaps not so ornamental as deer, but they are far more profitable."
But that was in the golden—monetarily—latter half of Queen Victoria's reign. Miners were then "good working men."
Winter had made this speech, half apologetic, to his guest, the then Prince of Wales. And the Prince had replied, in his rather guttural English:
"You are quite right. If there were coal under Sandringham, I would open a mine on the lawns, and think it first-rate landscape gardening. Oh, I am quite willing to exchange roe-deer for colliers, at the price. Your men are good men too, I hear."
But then, the Prince had perhaps an exaggerated idea of the beauty of money, and the blessings of industrialism.
However, the Prince had been a King, and the King had died, and now there was another King, whose chief function seemed to be, to
open soup-kitchens.
And the good working men were somehow hemming Shipley in. New mining villages crowded on the park, and the squire felt somehow that the population was alien. He used to feel, in a good-natured but quite grand way, lord of his own domain and of his own colliers. Now, by a subtle pervasion of the new spirit, he had somehow been pushed out. It was he who did not belong any more. There was no mistaking it. The mines, the industry had a will of its own, and this will was against the gentleman-owner. All the colliers took part in the will, and it was hard to live up against it. It either shoved you out of the place, or out of life altogether.
Squire Winter, a soldier, had stood it out. But he no longer cared to walk in the park after dinner. He almost hid, indoors. Once he had walked, bare-headed, and in his patent-leather shoes and purple silk socks, with Connie down to the gate, talking to her in his well-bred rather haw-haw fashion. But when it came to passing the little gangs of colliers who stood and stared without either salute or anything else, Connie felt how the lean, well-bred old man winced, winced as an elegant antelope stag in a cage winces from the vulgar stare. The colliers were not personally hostile: not at all. But their spirit was cold, and shoving him out. And deep down, there was a profound grudge. They "worked for him." And in their ugliness, they resented his elegant, well-groomed, well-bred existence. "Who's he!" It was the difference they resented.
And somewhere, in his secret English heart, being a good deal of a soldier, he believed they were right to resent the difference. He felt himself a little in the wrong, for having all the advantages. Nevertheless he represented a system, and he would not be shoved out.
Except by death. Which came on him soon after Connie's call, suddenly. And he remembered Clifford handsomely in his will.
The heirs at once gave out the order for the demolishing of Shipley. It cost too much to keep up. No one would live there. So it was broken up. The avenue of yews was cut down. The park was denuded of its timber, and divided into lots. It was near enough to
Uthwaite. In the strange, bald desert of this still-one-more no-man'sland, new little streets of semi-detacheds were run up, very desirable! The Shipley Hall Estate!
Within a year of Connie's last call, it had happened. There stood Shipley Hall Estate, an array of red-brick semi-detached "villas" in new streets. No one would have dreamed that the stucco hall had stood there twelve months before.
But this is a later stage of King Edward's landscape gardening, the sort that has an ornamental coal mine on the lawn.
One England blots out another. The England of the Squire Winters and the Wragby Halls was gone, dead. The blotting out was only not yet complete.
What would come after? Connie could not imagine. She could only see the new brick streets spreading into the fields, the new erections rising at the collieries, the new girls in their silk stockings, the new collier lads lounging into the Pally or the Welfare. The younger generation were utterly unconscious of the old England. There was a gap in the continuity of consciousness, almost American: but industrial really. What next?
Connie always felt there was no next. She wanted to hide her head in the sand: or at least, in the bosom of a living man.
The world was so complicated and weird and gruesome! The common people were so many, and really, so terrible. So she thought as she was going home, and saw the colliers trailing from the pits, grey-black, distorted, one shoulder higher than the other, slurring their heavy ironshod boots. Underground grey faces, whites of eyes rolling, necks cringing from the pit roof, shoulders out of shape. Men! Men! Alas, in some ways patient and good men. In other ways, non-existent. Something that men should have was bred and killed out of them. Yet they were men. They begot children. One might bear a child to them. Terrible, terrible thought! They were good and kindly. But they were only half, only the grey half of a human being. As yet, they were "good." But even that was the goodness of their halfness. Supposing the dead in them ever rose up! But no, it
was too terrible to think of. Connie was absolutely afraid of the industrial masses. They seemed so weird to her. A life with utterly no beauty in it, no intuition, always "in the pit."
Children from such men! Oh God, oh God!
Yet Mellors had come from such a father. Not quite. Forty years had made a difference, an appalling difference in manhood. The iron and the coal had eaten deep into the bodies and souls of the men.
Incarnate ugliness, and yet alive! What would become of them all? Perhaps with the passing of the coal they would disappear again, off the face of the earth. They had appeared out of nowhere in their thousands, when the coal had called for them. Perhaps they were only weird fauna of the coalseams. Creatures of another reality, they were elementals, serving the elements of coal, as the metal workers were elementals, serving the element of iron. Men not men, but animas of coal and iron and clay. Fauna of the elements, carbon, iron, silicon: elementals. They had perhaps some of the weird inhuman beauty of minerals, the lustre of coal, the weight and blueness and resistance of iron, the transparency of glass. Elemental creatures, weird and distorted, of the mineral world! They belonged to the coal, the iron, the clay, as fish belong to the sea and worms to dead wood. The anima of mineral disintegration!
Connie was glad to be home, to bury her head in the sand. She was glad even to babble to Clifford. For her fear of the mining and iron Midlands affected her with a queer feeling that went all over her, like influenza.
"Of course I had to have tea in Miss Bentley's shop," she said.
"Really! Winter would have given you tea."
"Oh yes, but I daren't disappoint Miss Bentley."
Miss Bentley was a sallow old maid with a rather large nose and romantic disposition, who served tea with a careful intensity worthy of a sacrament.
"Did she ask after me?" said Clifford.
"Of course!—May I ask your Ladyship how Sir Clifford is!—I believe she ranks you even higher than Nurse Cavell!"
"And I suppose you said I was blooming."
"Yes! And she looked as rapt as if I had said the heavens had opened to you. I said if she ever came to Tevershall she was to come and see you."
"Me! Whatever for! See me!"
"Why yes, Clifford. You can't be so adored without making some slight return. Saint George of Cappadocia was nothing to you, in her eyes."
"And do you think she'll come?"
"Oh, she blushed! and looked quite beautiful for a moment, poor thing! Why don't men marry the women who would really adore them?"
"The women start adoring too late. But did she say she'd come?"
"Oh!" Connie imitated the breathless Miss Bentley, "your Ladyship, if ever I should dare to presume!"
"Dare to presume! how absurd! But I hope to God she won't turn up. And how was her tea?"
"Oh, Lipton's and very strong! But Clifford, do you realise you are the Roman de la rose of Miss Bentley and lots like her?"
"I'm not flattered, even then."
"They treasure up every one of your pictures in the illustrated papers, and probably pray for you every night. It's rather wonderful."
She went upstairs to change.
That evening he said to her:
"You do think, don't you, that there is something eternal in marriage?"
She looked at him.
"But Clifford, you make eternity sound like a lid or a long, long chain that trailed after one, no matter how far one went."
He looked at her, annoyed.
"What I mean," he said, "is that if you go to Venice, you won't go in the hopes of some love affair that you can take au grand sérieux, will you?"
"A love affair in Venice au grand sérieux? No, I assure you! No, I'd never take a love affair in Venice more than au très petit sérieux."
She spoke with a queer kind of contempt. He knitted his brows, looking at her.
Coming downstairs in the morning, she found the keeper's dog Flossie sitting in the corridor outside Clifford's room, and whimpering very faintly.
"Why Flossie!" she said softly, "What are you doing here?"
And she quietly opened Clifford's door. Clifford was sitting up in bed, with the bed-table and typewriter pushed aside, and the keeper was standing attention at the foot of the bed. Flossie ran in. With a faint gesture of head and eyes, Mellors ordered her to the door again, and she slunk out.
"Oh, good morning Clifford!" Connie said. "I didn't know you were busy." Then she looked at the keeper, saying good morning to him. He murmured his reply, looking at her as if vaguely But she felt a whiff of passion touch her, from his mere presence.
"Did I interrupt you, Clifford? I'm sorry."
"No, it's nothing of any importance."
She slipped out of the room again, and up to the blue boudoir on the first floor. She sat in the window, and saw him go down the drive, with his curious, silent motion, effaced. He had a natural sort of quiet distinction, an aloof pride, and also a certain look of frailty. A hireling! One of Clifford's hirelings! "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings."
Was he an underling? Was he? What did he think of her?
It was a sunny day, and Connie was working in the garden, and Mrs. Bolton was helping her. For some reason, the two women had drawn together, in one of the unaccountable flows and ebbs of sympathy that exist between people. They were pegging down carnations, and putting in small plants for the summer. It was work they both liked. Connie especially felt a delight in putting the soft roots of young plants into a soft black puddle, and cradling them down. On this spring morning she felt a quiver in her womb too, as if the sunshine had touched it and made it happy.
"It is many years since you lost your husband?" she said to Mrs. Bolton, as she took up another little plant and laid it in its hole.
"Twenty-three!" said Mrs. Bolton, as she carefully separated the young columbines into single plants. "Twenty-three years since they brought him home."
Connie's heart gave a lurch, at the terrible finality of it. "Brought him home!"
"Why did he get killed, do you think?" she asked. "He was happy with you?"
It was a woman's question to a woman. Mrs. Bolton put aside a strand of hair from her face, with the back of her hand.
"I don't know, my Lady! He sort of wouldn't give in to things: he wouldn't really go with the rest. And then he hated ducking his head for anything on earth. A sort of obstinacy, that gets itself killed. You see he didn't really care. I lay it down to the pit. He ought never to have been down pit. But his dad made him go down, as a lad; and then, when you're over twenty, it's not very easy to come out."
"Did he say he hated it?"
"Oh no! Never! He never said he hated anything. He just made a funny face. He was one of those who wouldn't take care: like some of the first lads as went off so blithe to the war and got killed right away. He wasn't really wezzle-brained. But he wouldn't care. I used to say to him: 'You care for nought nor nobody!' But he did! The way he sat when my first baby was born, motionless, and the sort of fatal eyes he looked at me with, when it was over! I had a bad time, but I
had to comfort him 'It's all right, lad, it's all right!' I said to him. And he gave me a look, and that funny sort of smile. He never said anything. But I don't believe he had any right pleasure with me at nights after; he'd never really let himself go. I used to say to him: 'Oh, let thysen go, lad!'—I'd talk broad to him sometimes. And he said nothing. But he wouldn't let himself go, or he couldn't. He didn't want me to have any more children. I always blamed his mother, for letting him in th' room. He'd no right t'ave been there. Men makes so much more of things than they should, once they start brooding."
"Did he mind so much?" said Connie in wonder.
"Yes, he sort of couldn't take it for natural, all that pain. And it spoilt his pleasure in his bit of married love. I said to him: If I don't care, why should you? It's my look-out!—But all he'd ever say was: It's not right!"
"Perhaps he was too sensitive," said Connie.
"That's it! When you come to know men, that's how they are: too sensitive in the wrong place. And I believe, unbeknown to himself, he hated the pit, just hated it. He looked so quiet when he was dead, as if he'd got free. He was such a nice looking lad. It just broke my heart to see him, so still and pure looking, as if he'd wanted to die. Oh, it broke my heart, that did. But it was the pit."
She wept a few bitter tears, and Connie wept more. It was a warm spring day, with a perfume of earth and of yellow flowers, many things rising to bud, and the garden still with the very sap of sunshine.
"It must have been terrible for you!" said Connie.
"Oh, my Lady! I never realised at first. I could only say: Oh my lad, what did you want to leave me for!—That was all my cry. But somehow I felt he'd come back."
"But he didn't want to leave you," said Connie.
"Oh, no, my Lady! That was only my silly cry. And I kept expecting him back. Especially at nights. I kept waking up thinking: Why he's not in bed with me!—It was as if my feelings wouldn't believe he'd
gone. I just felt he'd have to come back and lie against me, so I could feel him with me. That was all I wanted, to feel him there with me, warm. And it took me a thousand shocks before I knew he wouldn't come back, it took me years."
"The touch of him," said Connie.
"That's it, my Lady! the touch of him! I've never got over it to this day, and never shall. And if there's a heaven above, he'll be there, and will lie up against me so I can sleep."
Connie glanced at the handsome, brooding face in fear. Another passionate one out of Tevershall! The touch of him! For the bonds of love are ill to loose!
"It's terrible, once you've got a man into your blood!" she said.
"Oh, my Lady! And that's what makes you feel so bitter. You feel folks wanted him killed. You feel the pit fair wanted to kill him. Oh, I felt, if it hadn't been for the pit, an' them as runs the pit, there'd have been no leaving me. But they all want to separate a woman and a man, if they're together."
"If they're physically together," said Connie.
"That's right my Lady! There's a lot of hard-hearted folks in the world. And every morning when he got up and went to th' pit, I felt it was wrong, wrong. But what else could he do? What can a man do?"
A queer hate flared in the woman.
"But can a touch last so long?" Connie asked suddenly. "That you could feel him so long?"
"Oh my Lady, what else is there to last? Children grows away from you. But the man, well—! But even that they'd like to kill in you, the very thought of the touch of him. Even your own children! Ah well! We might have drifted apart, who knows. But the feeling's something different. It's 'appen better never to care. But there, when I look at women who's never really been warmed through by a man, well, they seem to me poor dool-owls after all, no matter how they may dress up and gad. No, I'll abide by my own. I've not much respect for people."
CHAPTER XII
Connie went to the wood directly after lunch. It was really a lovely day, the first dandelions making suns, the first daisies so white. The hazel thicket was a lacework of half-open leaves, and the last dusty perpendicular of the catkins. Yellow celandines now were in crowds, flat open, pressed back in urgency, and the yellow glitter of themselves. It was the yellow, the powerful yellow of early summer. And primroses were broad, and full of pale abandon, thick-clustered primroses no longer shy The lush, dark green of hyacinths was a sea, with buds rising like pale corn, while in the riding the forget-menots were fluffing up, and columbines were unfolding their ink-purple riches, and there were bits of bluebird's eggshell under a bush. Everywhere the bud-knots and the leap of life!
The keeper was not at the hut. Everything was serene, brown chickens running lustily. Connie walked on towards the cottage, because she wanted to find him.
The cottage stood in the sun, off the wood's edge. In the little garden the double daffodils rose in tufts, near the wide-open door, and red double daisies made a border to the path. There was the bark of a dog, and Flossie came running.
The wide-open door! so he was at home. And the sunlight falling on the red-brick floor! As she went up the path, she saw him through the window, sitting at the table in his shirtsleeves, eating. The dog wuffed softly, slowly wagging her tail.
He rose, and came to the door, wiping his mouth with a red handkerchief, still chewing.
"May I come in?" she said.
"Come in!"
The sun shone into the bare room, which still smelled of a mutton chop, done in a dutch oven before the fire, because the dutch oven still stood on the fender, with the black potato-saucepan on a piece
of paper beside it on the white hearth. The fire was red, rather low, the bar dropped, the kettle singing.
On the table was his plate, with potatoes and the remains of the chop; also bread in a basket, salt, and a blue mug with beer. The tablecloth was white oil-cloth. He stood in the shade.
"You are very late," she said. "Do go on eating!"
She sat down on a wooden chair, in the sunlight by the door
"I had to go to Uthwaite," he said, sitting down at table but not eating.
"Do eat," she said.
But he did not touch the food.
"Shall y'ave something?" he asked her "Shall y'ave a cup of tea? t' kettle's on t' boil." He half rose again from his chair.
"If you'll let me make it myself," she said rising. He seemed sad, and she felt she was bothering him.
"Well, teapot's in there,"—he pointed to a little, drab corner cupboard; "an' cups. An' tea's on t' mantel ower yer 'ead."
She got the black teapot, and the tin of tea from the mantelshelf. She rinsed the teapot with hot water, and stood a moment wondering where to empty it.
"Thrown it out," he said, aware of her. "It's clean."
She went to the door and threw the drop of water down the path. How lovely it was here, so still, so really woodland. The oaks were putting out ochre yellow leaves; in the garden the red daisies were like red plush buttons. She glanced at the big, hollow sandstone slab of the threshold, now crossed by so few feet.
"But it's lovely here," she said. "Such a beautiful stillness, everything alive and still."
He was eating again, rather slowly and unwillingly, and she could feel he was discouraged. She made the tea in silence, and set the teapot on the hob, as she knew the people did. He pushed his plate
aside and went to the back place; she heard a latch click, then he came back with cheese on a plate, and butter.
She set the two cups on the table, there were only two.
"Will you have a cup of tea?" she said.
"If you like. Sugar's in th' cupboard, an' there's a little cream-jug. Milk's in a jug in th' pantry."
"Shall I take your plate away?" she asked him. He looked up at her with a faint ironical smile.
"Why ... if you like," he said, slowly eating bread and cheese. She went to the back, into the penthouse scullery, where the pump was. On the left was a door, no doubt the pantry door. She unlatched it, and almost smiled at the place he called a pantry; a long narrow whitewashed slip of a cupboard. But it managed to contain a little barrel of beer, as well as a few dishes and bits of food. She took a little milk from the yellow jug.
"How do you get your milk?" she asked him, when she came back to the table.
"Flints! They leave me a bottle at the warren end. You know, where I met you!"
But he was discouraged.
She poured out the tea, poising the cream-jug.
"No milk," he said; then he seemed to hear a noise, and looked keenly through the doorway.
"'Appen we'd better shut," he said.
"It seems a pity," she replied. "Nobody will come, will they?"
"No unless it's one in a thousand, but you never know."
"And even then it's no matter," she said. "It's only a cup of tea. Where are the spoons?"
He reached over, and pulled open the table drawer. Connie sat at table in the sunshine of the doorway.
"Flossie!" he said to the dog, who was lying on a little mat at the stair foot. "Go an' hark, hark!"
He lifted his finger, and his "hark!" was very vivid. The dog trotted out to reconnoitre.
"Are you sad today?" she asked him.
He turned his blue eyes quickly, and gazed direct on her.
"Sad! no, bored! I had to go getting summonses for two poachers I caught, and oh well, I don't like people."
He spoke cold, good English, and there was anger in his voice.
"Do you hate being a gamekeeper?" she asked.
"Being a gamekeeper, no! So long as I'm left alone. But when I have to go messing around at the police station, and various other places, and waiting for a lot of fools to attend to me ... oh well, I get mad ..." and he smiled, with a certain faint humour.
"Couldn't you be really independent?" she asked.
"Me? I suppose I could, if you mean manage to exist on my pension. I could! But I've got to work, or I should die. That is, I've got to have something that keeps me occupied. And I'm not in a good enough temper to work for myself. It's got to be a sort of job for somebody else, or I should throw it up in a month, out of bad temper. So altogether I'm very well off here, especially lately...."
He laughed at her again, with mocking humour
"But why are you in a bad temper?" she asked. "Do you mean you are always in a bad temper?"
"Pretty well," he said, laughing. "I don't quite digest my bile."
"But what bile?" she said.
"Bile!" he said. "Don't you know what that is?" She was silent, and disappointed. He was taking no notice of her.
"I'm going away for a while next month," she said.
"You are! Where to?"
"Venice."
"Venice! With Sir Clifford? For how long?"
"For a month or so," she replied. "Clifford won't go."
"He'll stay here?" he asked.
"Yes! He hates to travel as he is."
"Ay, poor devil!" he said, with sympathy.
There was a pause.
"You won't forget me when I'm gone, will you?" she asked. Again he lifted his eyes and looked full at her.
"Forget?" he said. "You know nobody forgets. It's not a question of memory."
She wanted to say: "What then?" but she didn't. Instead, she said in a mute kind of voice: "I told Clifford I might have a child."
Now he really looked at her, intense and searching.
"You did?" he said at last. "And what did he say?"
"Oh, he wouldn't mind. He'd be glad, really, so long as it seemed to be his." She dared not look up at him.
He was silent a long time, then he gazed again on her face.
"No mention of me, of course?" he said.
"No. No mention of you," she said.
"No, he'd hardly swallow me as a substitute breeder.—Then where are you supposed to be getting the child?"
"I might have a love affair in Venice," she said.
"You might," he replied slowly. "So that's why you're going?"
"Not to have the love affair," she said, looking up at him, pleading.
"Just the appearance of one," he said.
There was silence. He sat staring out of the window, with a faint grin, half mockery, half bitterness, on his face. She hated his grin.
"You've not taken any precautions against having a child then?" he asked her suddenly. "Because I haven't."
"No," she said faintly. "I should hate that."
He looked at her, then again with the peculiar subtle grin out of the window. There was a tense silence.
At last he turned to her and said satirically:
"That was why you wanted me then, to get a child?"
She hung her head.
"No. Not really," she said.
"What then, really?" he asked rather bitingly.
She looked up at him reproachfully, saying: "I don't know." He broke into a laugh.
"Then I'm damned if I do," he said.
There was a long pause of silence, a cold silence.
"Well," he said at last. "It's as your Ladyship likes. If you get the baby, Sir Clifford's welcome to it. I shan't have lost anything. On the contrary, I've had a very nice experience, very nice indeed!" and he stretched in a half suppressed sort of yawn. "If you've made use of me," he said, "it's not the first time I've been made use of; and I don't suppose it's ever been as pleasant as this time; though of course one can't feel tremendously dignified about it." He stretched again, curiously, his muscles quivering, and his jaw oddly set.
"But I didn't make use of you," she said, pleading.
"At your Ladyship's service," he replied.
"No," she said. "I liked your body."
"Did you?" he replied, and he laughed. "Well then, we're quits, because I liked yours."
He looked at her with queer darkened eyes.
"Would you like to go upstairs now?" he asked her, in a strangled sort of voice.
"No, not here. Not now!" she said heavily, though if he had used any power over her, she would have gone, for she had no strength against him.
He turned his face away again, and seemed to forget her.
"I want to touch you like you touch me," she said. "I've never really touched your body."
He looked at her, and smiled again. "Now?" he said.
"No! No! Not here! At the hut. Would you mind?"
"How do I touch you?" he asked.
"When you feel me."
He looked at her, and met her heavy, anxious eyes.
"And do you like it when I feel you?" he asked, laughing at her still.
"Yes, do you?" she said.
"Oh, me!" Then he changed his tone. "Yes," he said. "You know without asking." Which was true.
She rose and picked up her hat. "I must go," she said.
"Will you go?" he replied politely
She wanted him to touch her, to say something to her, but he said nothing, only waited politely.
"Thank you for the tea," she said.
"I haven't thanked your Ladyship for doing me the honours of my teapot," he said.
She went down the path, and he stood in the doorway, faintly grinning. Flossie came running with her tail lifted. And Connie had to plod dumbly across into the wood, knowing he was standing there watching her, with that incomprehensible grin on his face.
She walked home very much downcast and annoyed. She didn't at all like his saying he had been made use of; because in a sense it was true. But he oughtn't to have said it. Therefore, again, she was
divided between two feelings; resentment against him, and a desire to make it up with him.
She passed a very uneasy and irritated teatime, and at once went up to her room. But when she was there it was no good; she could neither sit nor stand. She would have to do something about it. She would have to go back to the hut; if he was not there, well and good. She slipped out of the side door, and took her way direct and a little sullen. When she came to the clearing she was terribly uneasy. But there he was again, in his shirtsleeves, stooping, letting the hens out of the coops, among the chicks that were now growing a little gawky, but were much more trim than hen-chickens.
She went straight across to him.
"You see I've come!" she said.
"Ay, I see it!" he said, straightening his back, and looking at her with a faint amusement.
"Do you let the hens out now?" she asked.
"Yes, they've sat themselves to skin and bone," he said. "An' now they're not all that anxious to come out an' feed. There's no self in a sitting hen; she's all in the eggs or the chicks."
The poor mother hens; such blind devotion! even to eggs not their own! Connie looked at them in compassion. A helpless silence fell between the man and the woman.
"Shall us go i' th' 'ut?" he asked.
"Do you want me?" she asked, in a sort of mistrust.
"Ay, if you want to come."
She was silent.
"Come then!" he said.
And she went with him to the hut. It was quite dark when he had shut the door, so he made a small light in the lantern, as before.
"Have you left your underthings off?" he asked her.
"Yes!"
"Ay, well, then I'll take my things off too."
He spread the blankets, putting one at the side for a coverlet. She took off her hat, and shook her hair. He sat down, taking off his shoes and gaiters, and undoing his cord breeches.
"Lie down then!" he said, when he stood in his shirt. She obeyed in silence, and he lay beside her, and pulled the blanket over them both.
"There!" he said.
And he lifted her dress right back, till he came even to her breasts. He kissed them softly, taking the nipples in his lips in tiny caresses.
"Eh, but tha'rt nice, tha'rt nice!" he said, suddenly rubbing his face with a snuggling movement against her warm belly.
And she put her arms round him under his shirt, but she was afraid, afraid of his thin, smooth, naked body, that seemed so powerful, afraid of the violent muscles. She shrank, afraid.
And when he said, with a sort of little sigh: "Eh, tha'rt nice!" something in her quivered, and something in her spirit stiffened in resistance: stiffened from the terribly physical intimacy, and from the peculiar haste of his possession. And this time the sharp ecstacy of her own passion did not overcome her; she lay with her hands inert on his striving body, and do what she might, her spirit seemed to look on from the top of her head, and the butting of his haunches seemed ridiculous to her, and the sort of anxiety of his penis to come to its little evacuating crisis seemed farcical. Yes, this was love, this ridiculous bouncing of the buttocks, and the wilting of the poor insignificant, moist little penis. This was the divine love! After all, the moderns were right when they felt contempt for the performance; for it was a performance. It was quite true, as some poets said, that the God who created man must have had a sinister sense of humour, creating him a reasonable being, yet forcing him to take this ridiculous posture, and driving him with blind craving for this ridiculous performance. Even a Maupassant found it a humiliating anticlimax. Men despised the intercourse act, and yet did it.
Cold and derisive her queer female mind stood apart, and though she lay perfectly still, her impulse was to heave her loins, and throw the man out, escape his ugly grip, and the butting overriding of his absurd haunches. His body was a foolish, impudent, imperfect thing, a little disgusting in its unfinished clumsiness. For surely a complete evolution would eliminate this performance, this "function."
And yet when he had finished, soon over, and lay very very still, receding into silence, and a strange, motionless distance, far, farther than the horizon of her awareness, her heart began to weep. She could feel him ebbing away, ebbing away, leaving her there like a stone on a shore. He was withdrawing, his spirit was leaving her. He knew.
And in real grief, tormented by her own double consciousness and reaction, she began to weep. He took no notice, or did not even know. The storm of weeping swelled and shook her, and shook him.
"Ay!" he said, "It was no good that time. You wasn't there." So he knew! Her sobs became violent.
"But what's amiss?" he said. "It's once in a while that way."
"I ... I can't love you," she sobbed, suddenly feeling her heart breaking.
"Canna ter? Well, dunna fret! There's no law says as tha's got to. Ta'e it for what it is."
He still lay with his hand on her breast. But she had drawn both her hands from him.
His words were small comfort. She sobbed aloud.
"Nay, nay," he said. "Ta'e the thick wi' th' thin. This wor' a bit o' thin for once."
She wept bitterly, sobbing: "But I want to love you, and I can't. It only seems horrid."
He laughed a little, half bitter, half amused.
"It isna horrid," he said, "even if tha thinks it is. An' tha canna ma'e it horrid. Dunna fret thysen about lovin' me. Tha'lt niver force thysen to
't. There's sure to be a bad nut in a basketful. Tha mun ta'e th' rough wi' th' smooth."
He took his hand away from her breast, not touching her And now she was untouched she took an almost perverse satisfaction in it. She hated the dialect: the thee and the tha and the thysen. He could get up if he liked, and stand there above her buttoning down those absurd corduroy breeches, straight in front of her. After all, Michaelis had had the decency to turn away. This man was so assured in himself, he didn't know what a clown other people found him, a halfbred fellow.
Yet, as he was drawing away, to rise silently and leave her, she clung to him in terror.
"Don't! Don't go! Don't leave me! Don't be cross with me! Hold me! Hold me fast!" she whispered in blind frenzy, not even knowing what she said, and clinging to him with uncanny force. It was from herself she wanted to be saved, from her own inward anger and resistance. Yet how powerful was that inward resistance that possessed her!
He took her in his arms again and drew her to him, and suddenly she became small in his arms, small and nestling. It was gone, the resistance was gone, and she began to melt in a marvellous peace. And as she melted small and wonderful in his arms, she became infinitely desirable to him, all his blood-vessels seemed to scald with intense yet tender desire, for her, for her softness, for the penetrating beauty of her in his arms, passing into his blood. And softly, with that marvellous swoon-like caress of his hand in pure soft desire, softly he stroked the silky slope of her loins, down, down between her soft warm buttocks, coming nearer and nearer to the very quick of her. And she felt him like a flame of desire, yet tender, and she felt herself melting in the flame. She let herself go. She felt his penis risen against her with silent amazing force and assertion, and she let herself go to him. She yielded with a quiver that was like death, she went all open to him. And oh, if he were not tender to her now, how cruel, for she was all open to him and helpless!
She quivered again at the potent inexorable entry inside her, so strange and terrible. It might come with the thrust of a sword in her
